Division of Tanauan City

TANAUAN CITY NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL

Trapiche 1, Tanauan City
“Excellence is our Culture”

Name:Kristel Anne B. Runas Section: 9-Padolina

Subject: Research 9

Article Reading No. 1

“Fission”
By Luis alvarez

Summary:

On January 1939, the narrator learned about the discovery of nuclear

fission while his hair is being cut in Berkeley Campus barbershop. Buried on an inside
page of the San Francisco Chronicle was a story from Washington reporting Neils Bohr’s
announcement that German chemists had split the uranium atom by bombarding it
with neutrons. When the narrator saw the news, he stopped the barber in mid-snip and
ran all the way to the Radiation Laboratory to spread the word. He first saw Phil
Abelson, his graduate student. The narrator already knew that if he tell Phil the news, he
would very shock. The narrator said that he have something terribly important to tell
and he ask Phil Abelson to lie down on the table. His graduate student sensed his
seriousness and complied. When the narrator already tell the news to him, Phil was
stunned and realized immediately, as the narrator had before, that he was within days
of making the same discovery himself.

1934, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues at the Physics Institute in Rome had
noted that bombarding uranium with neutrons gave rise to a variety of radioactivities of
different half-lives. They tried to prove that among those artificially created
radioactivities were new elements beyond uranium, transunarics never before seen on
earth. They noted these two reactions near the end of a paper mailed in July,
1934,”appear to confirm the hypothesis that we have elements of atomic number
higher than 92”. The group of Fermi compared the radioisotopes with elements with
lesser atomic number, all the way down the periodic table to lead, atomic number 82,
to which uranium eventually decays.

STEM – RESEARCH 9 OSMERANDO P . ALCANTARA JR.

 Division of Tanauan City
TANAUAN CITY NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL
Trapiche 1, Tanauan City
“Excellence is our Culture”
Ida Noddack, German chemist, published a critical demurrer. She argued
that Fermi could not claim the discovery of new transuranium elements, until Fermi’s
unidentified radioisotopes had been compared with every element in the periodic
table. The notion that uranium could turn into a lighter element in the middle of the
periodic table under bombardment by nothing more energetic than thermal neutrons
was self-evidently ridiculous that’s why no one took Noddack seriously.

Reflections:

STEM – RESEARCH 9 OSMERANDO P . ALCANTARA JR.